Al Gore knows

When Al Gore sold the Internet to Google, he stipulated one thing: Anarchy reigns. And so it has been for these many years.

Size really doesn’t give you any advantage. The big and very small have the same chance, the same cost, the same public. The Internet favors those that are techno-cool, market share be damned.

Two fellas in our industry know of what I speak and they are really old in Internet terms. (Anyone over 19 is already over the hill and should not be trusted when it comes to techno wizardry. By these standards these two are wizened seniors.) Maybe they learned this from their children but they have some very valuable info for flooring dealers trying to find their voice in the cyber world.

Bobby Glennon is COO of FloorForce. FloorForce helps retailers build great websites and comprehensive online marketing plans. Their view of the changed retail landscape and the possibilities of dealer websites are:

Retail store traffic is down but website traffic is up more than 3,000 percent. A retailer will get 10 to 20 more visits to their virtual showroom (website) than their actual store.

The retailer who brings new products to market and ties web-based solutions to help promote and drive those sales will win. The virtual showroom should show color swatches, room scenes etc. and should be part of any new product introduction. (Just putting the product on the floor doesn’t cut it anymore.)
She does her research online; she visits your store online (your website) and if she isn’t impressed she will not come to your store.

Videos are growing in importance. YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google. Those retailers that master the ability to market products, services, installation techniques, etc. through video will win.

This makes retailers very nervous: She expects to see products and prices. (This is confirmed by a WFCA study on online use.) Yes she wants to see prices on your website.

Website with “clearance,” “on sale” or “limited time,” will dramatically increase sales. (Just look at Lumber Liquidators’ website.)
Assume the customer has visited the website of Home Depot and or Lowe’s before she visits your site. At least 50 percent of all flooring customers will visit these competitors online and in their store.

John Simonson, owner of Webstreamdynamics, a web design firm for flooring retailers, is an ardent Green Bay Packers fan — cheesehead extraordinaire. He is also a very savvy flooring techno swami.

He knows that the words we use in our website must be words the consumer uses, not jargon of the industry. Take luxury vinyl tile — only 6,600 global searches per month are for luxury vinyl tile. That is statistically zero. But, there are 66,000 searches per month for “what is luxury vinyl tile” and 135,000 global searches per month for vinyl tile and 823,000 global searches per month for vinyl flooring.

Optimizing the keywords to attract more online flooring shoppers, John says you must “‘write like your customers talk to you, not how your flooring suppliers explain the product to you.” The way to get more folks to your site is to know, in this example, that the door to your really cool luxury vinyl tile is to use vinyl flooring and vinyl tile as your key words not the product descriptor our industry has given it.

Take it from our own old-folks home techno grey beards. The world is changing very, very fast.